


Lizbob Supernatural Meta (season 6)

by lizbobjones



Series: Lizbob Supernatural Meta Collection [8]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Archived From Tumblr, Cross-Posted on Tumblr, Fanwork Research & Reference Guides, Meta, Meta Essay, Non Fiction, archived from elizabethrobertajones blog
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-11
Updated: 2018-12-11
Packaged: 2019-09-16 11:28:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16953162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lizbobjones/pseuds/lizbobjones
Summary: I have been writing a lot of meta on tumblr for a long-ass time.





	1. Destiel Was Canon In The “My Heart Will Go On” AU and Bobby and Ellen Prove It

I don’t think we talk about Bobby and Ellen briefly being married in 6x17′s alternate universe enough as an example of bizarre non-canon canon relationships. Has there already been a long essay musing on this as part of the evidence in the whole AU where it’s literally “the angel who’s in love with you” [paraphrasing] as Balthazar says?

 

* * *

The show has a ridiculous number of alternate universe style episodes, or episodes which take place in a different level of reality, but only 2 which are really genuinely alternate universes, and they happen right near each other in the mid-late part of season 6. 

Let’s take a quick look at why alternate universes, though. 6x17 is a weird anomaly for why it happens, both inside the story and from a narrative point of view, which makes WHAT happens in it all that more interesting, and I’ll elaborate on that when I get to it. 

* * *

For the most part, the original “alternate universe” episode, 2x20, did the best work in showing us why you would use alternate universes in your story. It is actually just a dream, but for the best part of the episode Dean believes it’s a parallel universe and narratively, for the viewer, this is showing us the sort of exploration you get out of sending a character to a parallel universe, once you have a good grasp on the layout of the main universe.

We get to see a different version of the story, with huge changes to canon that could never have existed with the main story continuing as it did: the fridged women who powered the narrative from the first episode lived, and the main characters weren’t even retired from hunting - they literally never had been hunters. It’s the most extreme end of an alternate universe, and it works emotionally because at the far end of season 2 we’d been through just enough with the characters to be really emotionally affected by seeing them living a life like that, and at that point that was pretty much all it needed to do: fuck both us and Dean up with this glimpse.

The next three “alternate” realities are really weird and 2 rely on time loops/time travel effects and all are sort of “pocket universes” in their own ways: Mystery Spot, the Groundhog Day section aside, contains a 3 month bubble of time, which has been deleted from the universe’s canon after Sam is reset to Wednesday, creating an alternate universe only he knows about (which 6x17 follows the logic of). I still (but not for the sake of argument here) personally believe it was a pocket universe same as Changing Channels’ TV Land and that Dean never “really” died on the Wednesday even when it was currently happening to Sam, but either way, the other “alternate” which never happens is the 2014 of Endverse, so these 3 back each other up however you shake it, as that too was a timey wimey mess of a paradox that wrote itself out of happening  _by_  happening. ([Here, let Edlund explain it.](http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/127380010634/bert-and-ernie-are-gay-isthemachinesinging)) Similarly, TV Land is much larger than the warehouse it’s contained in, and impervious enough it takes Cas days to break in to find Sam and Dean, and I’m literally only mentioning it to back up the existence of the others’ mechanics, as if you can get logic from TV Land. :P 

Thrown in with that are It’s a Terrible Life, which was not an alternate universe, merely a memory wipe and change in their circumstances masquerading as an alternate universe very effectively, and to reach deep into the far end of the show from all this Apocalypse era stuff, Metatron’s fake Gabriel story from 9x18, that seems to just have been a very interactive vision, if you compare the transition back to the real world between that and Changing Channels, where there was a visible transition and continuity between how they were standing (and the holy fire staying in place and being a real thing rather than part of the fake TV world - don’t question a literal storywriting ass pull :P)… 

Anyway, the point is that all of these are chosen specifically to teach a lesson to the main characters; of them all, I think Endverse and Mystery Spot are the only examples of actual parallel universes, as they were the 2 most based in actual canon as it could have happened, and ended up being realities that no longer existed after the respective sufferer of each was put back to their original timeline, rendering the events in them as something else that had happened and branched off from the main timeline but were no longer a part of it. So the sort of “trousers of time” approach was already in play, much more by season 5 than 3, which didn’t make much of an effort to explain what had just happened. In both cases anyway, you can imagine a parallel 3 months during season 3 where Sam was  _not_  off on his revenge mission but living the main plot as we know it, and of course, now we’ve got through 2014, we know canon carried on past the events of Endverse without ever ending up there (metaphorical reinterpretations aside as an argument for another day). We can agree that every instance I’ve mentioned so far has served a very clear purpose to the narrative.

* * *

Then we come to season 6. Which no one ever seems to talk about probably because interpreting it’s plot is a headache and a half and there’s not a great deal of love for it, structurally, thanks to it being a “woah plot twist” ending that doesn’t have enough legs to stand on re: foreshadowing in the first part of the season. When I attempted to start rewatching it [I was musing a little](http://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/130232794973/i-think-id-like-to-take-you-up-on-that-beer) on how the sudden use of two confirmed,  _proper_  alternate realities fits somewhat thematically. However, the actual use of the alternate universes is somewhat bemusing, as both mirror each other in actual pointlessness of application.

Let’s start chronologically. 6x15 aka “the weirdest headache you will ever have” is blatantly just a concept episode to play with wanting to write the episode, and then justifying it. It’s amusingly, deliberately, avoiding being a major plot episode: the script that Sam and Dean attempt to act out/run lines with Misha is clearly the events that  _would_  have happened had Balthazar not thrust them into French Mistake!AU. The actual plot probably would have been something like the events of the actual episode, with a random scary angel coming to get them while Sam and Dean argue with actual Cas about locks needing keys and keys needing locks (while pouting horrifically). This splits us into 3 universes already: the one where Balthazar clearly failed to punt them into Actor AU, and it was played straight and was a pedestrian plot episode. The AU Sam and Dean ran around in. And of course the “Bobby comes downstairs to see a smashed window and spell ingredients everywhere, shakes his head, and goes out to the store to buy more liquor while he waits for Sam and Dean to come back from the AU” really boring version that actually happened in the main canon, where they were missing from the story. 

As such, Sam and Dean vaguely attempt to derive a moral from their adventure, but the entire exercise was pointless on their end as they were only a distraction. The last minutes of the episode get back to the main plot, but basically serve to illustrate much more literally than normal that the angel war stuff of that season literally only really happens when they aren’t there, because it’s too big budget for the show to have depicted, hanging one final lampshade on that fact.

* * *

Likewise, 6x17 is one of the few other episodes where it takes centre stage, as the main plot (the cowboy episode features some of the fighting, but it’s not the motivator for the main plot, which is the Eve arc, merely a device to add tension and foreshadowing within the episode). I suppose coasting off the success of their side of the story in 6x15, Cas and Balthy hatch a new plan involving alternate universes, meaning to permanently abandon the old timeline for one that’s working in their favour a little better. The quickest way to achieve that is meddling with the past and using the butterfly effect from one event to create a huge chain reaction in the universe.

Within the episode there’s the confusing suggestion that it is somehow still the main timeline but broken, mostly thanks to Atropos’s annoyance with the change, as well as Sam and Dean having memories of it without travelling there. This really isn’t consistent with any of the other world building, so let’s just assume that it was an unsustainable pocket universe because time travellers of the level of Balthazar meddling with shit are not on the harmless level of hapless humans changing tiny things like, for example, Sam and Dean time travelling and changing things in the past without spawning an unstable AU with Atropos popping up like “SERIOUSLY WHAT DID I TELL YOU!?!” and confiscating their phoenix ash to stop them fucking with the natural order by changing the past to obtain biological weapons (aka the plot summary of 6x17 from C&B’s POV) literally the next frikkin’ episode. 

(Seriously. I wasn’t joking when I said how much this fucks me up. My Heart Will Go On barely fits the show’s own rules about time travel OR alternate universes.)

* * *

So: like with Mystery Spot or Endverse, there’s a ~bubble~ universe that is the same size and general shape of the main universe, but with events that never took place in it, altered by time travel. 

If it’s an off-shoot of the main universe but with Cas and Balthy totally aware of what happened in the main universe and maybe even employing French Mistake levels of awareness between universes (since they know they changed it and clearly have memories of the old one - Balthazar makes a dig about Dean’s car) it creates an instability that has to be corrected for one reason or another. 

Atropos, despite having presumably existed in that universe long before the Titanic sunk and all through that time until the present, if she truly belongs to the universe that was only created when Balthazar sunk the Titanic, is clearly only  _able_  to become aware it’s a tampered with reality that is damaged in some way once the damage has actually happened. Since she starts attempting to correct it not at the time of the Titanic sinking, but in the present day equivalent to when the main universe C & B made their move, she must only be aware of the situation after the point in time in which Cas and Balthazar decided to sink the Titanic. 

This makes it the moment the universes branched off: the universe didn’t exist until the day the episode started in 2011 or whenever S6 was airing, as *that* is when the decision was made and the point the time traveller was fixed to in time as B’s present day, and so it is only afterwards when the universe officially exists, despite having a long history, is she able to attempt to fix it: she couldn’t immediately go Final Destination on the unexpected Titanic survivors and was faced with their descendants only, at which point all she can do is try to kill off the people who shouldn’t exist before they create any more deviations from the template universe that got changed. 

(I feel a good way around this is to look at her as destiny or at least an entity working for that purpose if it’s not personified… If the universe was meant to run on the timeline it did, and she knew what was supposed to happen right up until it didn’t with them averting the apocalypse, then she had a template from the universe where the titanic sank to work from, so even if the AU only sprang into existence the day the episode started, it was an AU which had been changed by time travel, therefore she was allowed to know the “plan” for the main universe with and without Titanic, from “without” being written down but “with” what had actually happened - there was no point in this universe where the Titanic had sunk. Assuming Sam and Dean stopped the apocalypse in the exact same way (but with a Mustang instead of an Impala) I don’t recall her saying anything that would suggest the Ellen Lives timeline hadn’t happened all the way through from her POV)

Also, as with Metatron’s story, Sam and Dean wake up elsewhere than they’d been, whereas there was clear geographical or spacial correlation between the universe hopping in The French Mistake or Changing Channels. I kind of feel, considering that unlike It’s a Terrible Life, Sam and Dean of the AU were complete characters who had lived that AU their entire lives and knew nothing different, that the memories “our” Sam and Dean woke up with were merely given to them by Cas from their AU counterparts, and we literally watched an episode with genuinely alternate, out-of-continuity Sam and Dean.

Anyway, tl;dr on the Watsonian side of this, the universe suddenly started to exist, then Atropos freaked out because she knew it had been meddled with: her solution was to fix what she could within the universe, while the bigger fix was to delete it entirely, leaving it to implode. (Likewise the potential Mystery Spot and Endverse AUs ceased to exist - Atropos’ methods would be more like, for example, Sam getting the Trickster to resurrect Dean without returning to Wednesday, but just continuing down that timeline with the 3 months of revenge hunting still something he’d literally, physically experienced in his actual past.)

* * *

So in an EXTREMELY convoluted way, back to those tags. 

Like I said somewhere near the top, all the original AU episodes were about teaching lessons of some sort, with some cross-over for our entertainment. 2x20 was not aimed as a moral lesson for Dean but mostly served to enlighten the viewer on character and world. The meta references in the “trickster” episodes are more for our entertainment doing double duty. The French Mistake is entirely fan/show communication with Sam and Dean as tools for that. There’s little to enlighten us on the characters, but a lot on how the show views them, how it views itself, and how it views the fans viewing it. My Heart Will Go On is another episode presented at the END as a lesson to Sam and Dean, and that’s certainly the writing point of it, but emotionally that’s not where the episode was at from the character point of view: we got an accidental glimpse of an AU that even Sam and Dean weren’t originally meant to know had happened - the point from Cas’s side was pretty much to let the new universe stay and hopefully Sam and Dean never find out that they used to drive a much sexier car or that Ellen was supposed to be dead. Of course, the biggest tragedy is Ellen and the question of her existence. 

There’s a few things going on here. I’m going to have to take a weird walk through some odd thoughts here: first up, J2: 

<http://nothingidputbeforeyou.tumblr.com/post/121858578734/they-used-the-implication-that-jared-and-jensen>

(I really have no interest in elaborating on that, not shipping it, but it seems a fairly logical train of thought to agree with the existence of the joke (a repeated theme in 10x05 with the Cockles dig which makes it seem that much more likely this was intentional if they will sneakily engage with RPS repeatedly) and therefore the suggestion that French Mistake verse at least teased that ship with a hook up seems plausible. 

Then there’s the timing of it all, with “And Then There Were None” sandwiched between these episodes, and if you haven’t just blinked in confusion at that title and clicked on it in Superwiki to remind yourself what it was, it’s the episode where they helpfully kill off Samuel, Gwen Campbell and Rufus. Which I always forget exists, but when you watch season 6 in one go, makes it pretty clear Bobby is in such a slump in the episode because he’s mourning Rufus and tbh I kinda ended up shipping Bobby/Rufus a wee bit, and it always made me squint that Bobby literally materialises a wife while having a period of Intense Feelings about a guy… For some reason Ellen’s presence kind of really is the only thing there aside from “I wonder what they got up to when they were younger” that leads me anywhere with those idle thoughts, just because it’s such a weird way to disrupt Bobby’s mourning. (I suppose it’s much more likely they wanted to put Ellen back on the show and worked around that, but these things you don’t know when you watch it for the first couple of times.)

So going via J2 and Bobby/Rufus from the 2 previous episodes, we get to 6x17 which is referencing a film that retold a story but threw in a ton of extra gratuitous romance and we’re contemplating a random new marriage with a ship that was never really suggested at all in previous canon, and one of the more overt Destiel jibes in the show… Heh. 

* * *

The thing is, like I said, these two AU episodes near each other don’t do a great deal for Sam and Dean except for the last 2 minutes of each rolling on the angel plot a bit with the very same basic premise (Cas and Balthazar are working together, Raphael sucks, Cas is desperate to win the thing… At least 6x17 introduces the souls thing a bit more directly, but basically this is the part of the middle end of the season where the plot gets stretched and stretched to fit between the MotW and the other subplots. The episodes are mostly left to entertain us with surface value action and drama plus, since there’s little to nothing for Sam and Dean to glean from the environments for plot or character purposes (unlike literally all the others, 2x20, 3x11, 5x04, 5x08, even 9x18 for Cas as an intentionally bad example…) what meaning is to be found in the episodes is entirely left to us. In fact by mirroring The French Mistake’s format so closely but with the main characters actually oblivious to the change, My Heart Will Go On ends up asking us FAR MORE than 6x15.

Of course, 6x15 has all its entertaining fan/show interaction, but 6x17 is left following its identical formula, without the interactive gimmick of utter fourth wall annihilation… Instead it presents us, as with What Is And What Should Never Be, with a sort of wish verse, except this time genuinely an alternate universe, where, if circumstances had not gone to shit with angel war stuff beyond their control or Atropos trying to fix it, they could have happily lived it out, with no ill effect, unlike Dean dying in a djinn coma had he stayed in his personalised reality. 

In this case Ellen has to come to terms with her unexpected life (do we think Atropos would have come for her eventually as she tidied up?) and fact she’d disappear right out of it if the problem were fixed. In the end her contribution is meaningless, as it’s human interest fluff compared to Atropos, Cas and Balthazar having a cosmos-level conversation that takes nothing about Ellen’s life or death into consideration, and Sam and Dean are frozen off to the side; as in The French Mistake, their contribution to the plot is utterly useless, and they’re left out of the drama for the sake of the main plot remaining concealed from them. 

In fact, the viewer interaction is that  _we_  see what Sam and Dean do not, which is everything that happens between them being frozen in time, and the waking up in the Impala, with Cas leaving them a very selective version of the story as their “lesson” at the end, something I think tbh would have been braver storytelling for Cas to have not reappeared, and Sam and Dean and Bobby to go about their “normal” lives for a minute at the end, utterly oblivious to the world changing. 

* * *

So in terms of character in the episode, all we’re really left with is compare and contrast what is and what should never have been. For Bobby, that’s easy: he’s sad as fuck, but he has a romantic partner with him supporting him through his grief, so you can only imagine how much MORE sad as fuck he’d be feeling without Ellen. Ellen exists as a wonderful fantasy, filling the mom role for them and hinting at Jo alive and well off hunting, but not, crucially, on screen or, say, romantically entangled with Dean or something. She exists, emotionally, on the absolute fringe of the episode. I can’t even remember if they say “Ellen and Jo” when talking about who dies. Ellen is the one with the emotional stake and one last chance to do anything. 

Like with 5x15 she briefly offers Bobby 1 episode of domestic marriage, this one much more realistic than Karen’s sad zombie return, and this time Bobby is left none the wiser to his loss. This mirrors 2x20 with Ellen as Mary - the dead woman back in their lives, but this was through no conscious choice or decision, presented as a quirk of fate, and it’s Bobby who gets the most care despite being a passive character all episode: at this point the show has stretched outside of Sam and Dean, and the episode covers Cas’s arc and makes us emotionally invested in Bobby’s grief, using the AU scenario to explore it in a safer, and more palatable way with a feminine influence to help present Bobby’s feelings and to look after him. Since Ellen ceases to exist in this role and Bobby doesn’t remember it, this is presented as entirely for our own feelings, once more with the interaction between the audience and the show more the point of writing it this way than for character development. It’s our own wish verse,  _not_  one of the characters’.

(and it HURTS)

* * *

AND SO FINALLY that is all the context behind me pointing and giggling at Ellen and Bobby and saying “lol Destiel”

The universe is clearly established as wrong, within the show’s own practice of making AUs, more in fitting with the moral lesson AUs like Endverse or Mystery Spot, but instead of for a characters’ lesson, it is for our own. Like with The French Mistake it offers us a chance to interact with the story  _more_  than the characters are currently involved: we have more agency and stake in both episodes for one reason or another, comedic or emotional. We are also in a stretch of random unexpected ships being teased - J2 and Bobby/Ellen - using the nature of alternate universes to put them on the table in a way that would be impossible otherwise. 

We are presented with characters who have a nearly identical history to our own Sam and Dean but are  _not_ , and have their own identity and set of life-long memories and experiences which, by nature of growing up in the Impala in the main timeline, are definitely changed pretty much from birth in meaningless ways, manifesting in tiny ways such as the different rock paper scissors outcome. But basically, we can’t say they’re  _our_  Sam and Dean.

The AU is left exploring the differences of the world, in many unstated, quiet ways such as the aforementioned sublime rock paper scissors moment.

Finally, if Atropos has only become aware at the  _point of change_  about the people she has to kill, despite them existing, and their parents and grandparents and great grandparents all existing since the Titanic didn’t sink, then the Castiel (and I suppose, Balthazar) of that universe were likewise  _unaware of their own change to the universe_ , only becoming aware at the point of change, by logical extension of the rules that clearly must have governed Atropos’ awareness if we assume they’re similar enough entities. 

Therefore, there is an entirely unexplored alternate range of possibilities for the relationship between Dean and Cas.

We don’t even know that, for example, Dean even was with Lisa over the year - with Bobby and Ellen and Jo all in one place and domestic (and Sam seeing how much Dean hit on Jo) for all we know Jo’s continued existence derailed that arc just enough (without her becoming a clearly labelled love interest) that Sam  didn’t push Dean at Lisa, but that Dean was left to hang out with that little family. For all we know, he never lost contact with Cas. Or never stopped hunting while Sam was in the Cage. 

Or maybe he did all those things from the real timeline but some other chain of events affected things… 

Anyway, it’s left delightfully open and even leading that, even if nothing was implied from Cas or Dean over that time (Cas acting weirdly stopping him from, I dunno, greeting Dean with “hey babe” since he just inherited the memories/realisation of the universe where Dean and he had not hooked up yet and “our” Cas sort of reasserted himself over the old one, with the awareness of what he’d done to create that universe and why showing up and ruining the party, unintentionally derailing the DeanCas progress of that universe to the main universe’s angstfest) that Balthazar’s snide comment, to a Dean who knew exactly what was up with him and Cas, was actually face value.

* * *

The only actual question is what does our  _main_  Dean remember of his AU’s reactions to that line, and if he realised that the other Dean was reacting to that line  _aware_  that Cas was in love with him?


	2. Forgiveness In Season 6

> **Anonymous** asked:
> 
> Your post about season six, and Dean forgiving Bobby and Sam for lying to him, you only mentioned Cas in passing. Cas brought Sam back and then never bothered to tell Dean anything either, and Dean still forgives him until TMWWBK when he gives Cas an ultimatum. Can you elaborate on what you meant there?
> 
> * * *

pfft, I couldn’t even remember what I said there :P 

([this post](https://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/165410010476/thejabberwock-exile-on-main-street-601-i))

I mean… I was kind of skirting around it because I don’t think Dean forgives Cas? I said 6x04 was where they reconciled and you might have noticed Cas not being in it and I was helpfully keeping that post about Sam and Bobby >.> Because we don’t talk about season 6 because it’s a friggin minefield especially when you’re planted in the Destiel camp, because of how the show used Cas that season as, essentially, the main antagonist, all the way through the season.

(Also we don’t talk about it because it really hurts, I assume :P I mean I accidentally started a season 7 fanclub but that season’s relatively easy once you have hindsight that it’s all distilled Pining For A Dead Loved One with a safety net that the loved one comes back, but hindsight doesn’t do anything to having to sit through a dozen episodes of them at each other’s throats and everyone angry and everything is awful all the time >.> The closest we get to cracking any jokes around Cas is the pizza man exchange.)

Their whole tension in season 6 is that Cas isn’t coming when Dean calls and not helping them (and ugh that line is one of those ones that’s terrible in context but romantic in a gifset and thank goodness Cas says it in nicer context at least once because it was manipulative and not true in context), and they ONLY see him when they demand he comes to them, unlike previous seasons where he was always the one bringing stuff to them, or it was more obviously an equal exchange of help, like 5x10 and all the stuff where they were working together to find the Colt. I don’t think there’s a single time they see Cas that year where they didn’t wrangle him down from Heaven with threats or bribes or weary resignation that asking him to come see about the one thing he’s actually interested in is the only way to get him to come home (Dean being the unappreciated wife with the trouble child, in this case, an entire side of the season away from Crowley accusing Cas of being the philandering husband >.>) 

So in the first couple of episodes they mention Cas hasn’t been answering and that’s his implicit guilt in the same thing that [@thejabberwock](https://tmblr.co/mG3EFNwljXQKXrX6Txw_ZFg) was saying Dean could have easily never forgiven Bobby and Sam over doing… And I think because they were on the same side and working together through the season and so on, at the very least they get over some of it just because close proximity and fighting side by side, and by the time all the cards are on the table re: Sam’s soul, by 6x07 or so, I think Dean can pretty much say it’s not really their fault if Sam was the moral compass on that decision. I mean he’s angry and miserable so I don’t think he has a sit down with himself and comes to that healthy decision, but over time I think it would easily slip away. 

But in 6x20 the worst part of it is the Cas watches Dean rake leaves moment, which not only uses the fact this *still hurts* that he didn’t come to Dean for help and bring Dean back into hunting when if anyone could have started it again it would have been Cas in that moment, but then in the actual confrontation we get another brief flashback to Cas turning away from Dean and going with Crowley when Dean asks where he was, so Cas making this mistake was the hugest part of the betrayal - that at the very least he could have let Dean know what he was doing, or they could have fought against impossible odds TOGETHER again to whatever end. I mean, like, there’s the genuine implication in that confrontation if you want to see it this way, that Dean would rather the world end but Cas hadn’t betrayed them and at least they could all go out on a moral high ground. 

Through the season it’s like what me and [@mittensmorgul](https://tmblr.co/mH08bFF21ewTCayiwIXZEOg) talk about sometimes about the whole unfinished conversation through the seasons, only when it starts here as a sort of one season microcosm version, it’s that Cas can’t and won’t tell Dean what he’s doing and why, and so Dean’s telling him stuff like, that’s ALL you’ve told us, when Cas repeats the couple of easy facts to explain what he’s doing. Dean gets to the end of the conversation in any meaningful way in 6x04 with Bobby and by the end of 6x07 he knows pretty much everything soulless!Sam didn’t tell him, including all his motivations, so he’s quite happy to work with him and try and get his soul back once all the cards are on the table. (I mean Bobby explained his motivations for keeping Dean out of the game back in 6x01 and we have no reason to suspect Bobby ever had any ulterior motives, but they had family teething problems for a bit - the first 4 episodes of the season deal with 1 member of TFW each and since Bobby had the lowest stakes of any of them, he gets resolved first to just go back to being dependable old Bobby with no particular emotional drama except being concerned about them/saving the world.)

But they hold off on using Cas until the 3rd episode and when he shows up he answers none of their questions in a satisfying way, shrugs off concern about not answering with the line about having a more profound bond with Dean (another one of those lines that looks great on a bumper sticker and has a lot of truth to it when you go deeper, but in context is actually a really shitty thing to say), and then he spends the episode not really answering anything, except for blatantly being in the middle of an escalating angel war so he has to admit some things like why angels are attacking him or why there’s even a problem they called him down for in the first place. We get his conversation alone with Balthazar to keep plot chatter away from the Winchesters and then he grants him his freedom because he needs Balthazar’s help more than he needs the good opinion of the Winchesters, especially because he’s already firmly decided with the raking leaves scene that they’re not going to be a part of it.

And that just makes the pattern from there that for the rest of the season Cas only comes when it suits him (aka when stakes are too high in the other direction - his war or Sam and Dean getting hurt, or occasionally when he can tell their friendship is really on the line if he doesn’t go, to the point he can’t make amends after he wins - that he has to drop by and try and reassure them or to get involved because they’re accidentally involved in the angel war or what have  you) even when Dean’s really worried about Sam - something we don’t know for sure until 6x20 that Cas is wracked with guilt about and also is fairly helpless to reveal his part in raising Sam about because it opens up too many other questions, namely the one about why he never got back in contact with Dean after 5x22. So it keeps on coming back to the massive void being that Cas saved Sam but then wouldn’t go to Dean for help, and it’s the empty space in his reasoning for why he doesn’t go to them casually for the entire season. 

12x19 offered us his actual motivations when it comes to them about how he feels and that he wants to protect them and I think when he justifies it he’s actually telling the truth about it because I think part of it was there was a lot of startling emotional honesty… Cas actually naming his motivations as Sam and Dean is a bit of a running joke in the show, in a very dark way, that he’ll always say it’s for Heaven like in season 9, and when Metatron called him out on it, he mostly just looked sad and affronted. Sadffronted. :P Anyway he just straight up tells Kelvin, no it’s not about Heaven and my reputation there, and honestly stuff you guys but I need some extra man power and resources, to do this for Sam and Dean. And he’s honest about the same thing when Sam and Dean catch up to him later. In season 6, which was a season-long version of the dynamic 12x19 explored as part of the Cas Retrospective of season 12, he mostly just bristled with impotent rage when things got this close to the surface, snapped something cryptic, and disappeared :P I mean I can’t even remember an exact moment that happened but he was exploiting the fact he could disappear at will to end a conversation like nobody’s business back then.

But because Cas won’t tell them anything meaningful about the plot, is massively unhelpful about Crowley until he just strategically kills him to stop the Winchesters asking too many questions, and avoids Dean over the issue of Sam’s soul, the entire first half of the season is filled with non-stop snapping, and actually Dean’s feelings towards Cas escalating into frustration and anger that only gets worse as the season goes on, and Cas can only give very small respites with unhelpful little promises he doesn’t have to follow up on if he keeps avoiding them. He gets himself a bit of a break when Crowley is dead because there’s less chance of the Winchesters stumbling onto the plan if they don’t think there’s a plan to stumble onto, and Eve works great as a distraction right up until she just goes and tells them that Crowley is still alive… But there’s a very uneasy feeling between Cas and Dean the entire time because the angel war distracting Cas is a huge hovering issue even when they’re talking about other stuff, and they never get a chance to foster better feelings or celebrate a win together or anything like that. 6x18 is possibly the only time they have a sort of aaaalmost uncomplicated good feeling and that’s because they won the episode, Cas has mostly managed to avoid suspicion about why he got stabbed.

I think it’s actually a testament to how much Cas means to Dean that when 6x20 rolls around, Dean is still staunchly defending Cas to begin with, that he can think Cas might have had his reasons all through this and that he thinks Cas is one of the good guys and can be reasoned with and if they treat him on the level it will all be fine. And in a way that is because they made it all through the season without ever addressing WHY Cas didn’t talk to him for a year so it’s sort of more like forgotten with all the new drama that’s happened since, rather than forgiven, because of course that WHY finally comes to the surface, and it turns into the entire reason they can’t reconcile this and why it’s so far gone that they missed the chance to reconcile it right back when Cas made the decision not to get Dean involved.

So I think… in a meta way… that THEY were not talking about season 6 until it was too late and that’s why Dean ever let things pass with Cas until it turned out they’d been betrayed and they should have been talking about season 6 with Cas :P I think that ultimatum didn’t really come out of the blue because Dean had been pissed off with Cas all season, but there was a sort of deep heart of hearts feeling that Cas had to utterly forsake before Dean would see Cas as betraying them, because he trusted and cared about him so much he couldn’t see it coming no matter how shady Cas acted, which meant that he was letting everything sketchy Cas did pass, including the hanging question of why HE didn’t tell Dean that Sam was back from the dead. I mean it gets to teenage girl writing in a diary, maybe he didn’t notice me because he was busy, sort of justifications but I said somewhere or other recently I think 6x20 confirmed their feelings on both sides (and I think it’s weird I’ve ever seen people say that it only confirmed one or the other, especially when I’ve seen that said both ways :P). And Dean giving Cas all those chances and benefit of the doubt to the point you could see the “oh hon” on Bobby’s face… Yeah. 

Also his determination that they could fix everything if Cas just backed off and let them help >.> Like, yeah, you’d have had to have a COMPLETELY different season to make that work - the entire point was it was unwinnable and the best Cas could do was utterly give up everything he ever had - allies, family, morality - to sacrifice for that fight, and he forsakes them all through the season in various small ways, culminating in a total loss of self but his goals completed. Dean’s version of the season where he gets to keep Cas would have been a loss but an emotional victory, and that is not what Cas could bear at that point. And 12x19 also makes the point of emotional victories and moral victories, and again I think that it’s like Dean’s pleas in 6x20 echo all the way up to current canon to remind Cas why he COULDN’T give in to Dean’s request.

The speed run of season 6 is 5x22 > 6x20 without taking a breath, because after all the nonsense and running around and red herrings, Cas ties the entire story back into what had just happened in Swan Song and how he made his decisions, and his conversation with Dean in the car at the end of Swan Song about “peace or freedom” is the key question there which defines Cas’s arc of the season and his decision for leaving Dean out. Dean chose freedom but regretted not going for peace because it was this promise of peace in 5x16, the talk of a paradise and a perfect bliss in Heaven, that swung him the most to nearly saying yes. Cas knows he picked freedom for everyone else but wanted peace in his heart of hearts and it’s the same thing Amara picked on in season 11, that Dean wanted quiet, and it’s the same thing Jack promised Cas and Cas repeated to Kelly. And was Michael and Raphael’s apocalypse sales pitch. 

So all these things are thematically linked together. I guess I’m still typing because it all ends up back at season 12 and presumably 13 based on how these apocalypse-era themes and now characters are back. In the raking leaves scene Cas picked peace for Dean, to stay with Lisa in oblivion in the suburbs, which denied Dean the choice (aka freedom) to help him, and in the start of season 6 we can use Bobby and Sam’s similar decision to leave Dean out to show it’s people deciding for him and not giving him a choice about how to live his life. I’m pretty sure the line “so Dean doesn’t have to” would fit perfectly in 6x20 as much as 12x19. And at the end of the day, Dean knows Cas is annoyingly right, that they’re Team Free Will (hence also… 12x19 hello again :P) and Dean embodies free will and will always end up fighting for it - but of course that doesn’t mean he can’t have a personal struggle with it, which makes it all the more interesting. They just made the decision for him to give into the bad side of the struggle - to let peace win when for Dean it should always be freedom because that’s what he’s the epitome of. 

And in 6x20 that’s what they fight about at the very very end, when Dean accuses Cas that he shouldn’t do whatever he wants and that he’s a child for trying, because he sees Cas as just not grasping these concepts properly, not understanding without the key information (that Cas’s motivations are HIM, the unfinished part of the conversation, the missing puzzle piece to all their interactions, etc) and knowing just how much Cas has grappled with this off screen and Cas’s understanding and motivations. I mean, the VO of the episode is from AFTER this argument, so I think Cas’s opinion on himself and his hubris and arrogance all comes AFTER and maybe BECAUSE OF the bollocking Dean gives him, because he has all the puzzle pieces (or nearly all) and genuine self-reflection and he’s in the position to wryly look back on everything he’s caused from this simple set of choices. He identifies all his own shortcomings but still sees there’s no other way and he’s going to have to make the leap to truly give up his morality and sense of self to accomplish what he needs.

And that’s also, to jump back to season 12, and weirdly I was having a dream about chilling with her last night, Lily Sunder, a literal mirror opposite to Cas in some ways, the human who got in too deep with angels instead of the angels who got in too deep with humans. She’s giving up parts of herself to get revenge, which is the opposite mission to Cas’s in season 6, to protect his loved ones. In a great metaphor for literally every revenge mission ever in this show and other media, Lily is losing her soul the longer she sustains herself on the mission. But it’s also a good metaphor to the idea of giving yourself up for any mission, to the point of only thinking you can accomplish it at a total loss of yourself. Cas gives her a way out to not complete it because she got absolution with Ishim, the one who truly hurt her, and peace with Cas as seeing him as truly repentant and changed and being able to say the right words to set her mind at rest. But Cas didn’t get that chance to not carry on his mission because it was one of protecting them before the bad stuff happened so the stakes were too high to be talked down from. He also tries to talk Dean back from a total loss of self in 10x22 for what good that does. And I think that’s all from experience - of knowing how it is to go over that line and thinking things are justified until they consume you. Cas had to shed his morality and his emotional attachment to Sam and Dean in order to work against them completely as the antagonist once his role was revealed to them and they boxed him into it by not understanding or giving him a chance - because they were more concerned for HIM than the bigger stakes - and so he could break Sam’s wall in order to get the job done. 

And to me that becomes the REAL hurt he caused them in season 6, far far over the earlier choices he has, and he needs to fix Sam immediately when he returns in season 7 and then spend the rest of the season in an arc about understanding and forgiveness and apologies with Dean. And that all springs from the earlier lies and betrayals and stuff but trying to tackle what Cas should have done in the start of season 6 is impossible because in many ways he was basically already the wrong word away from a 6x20 style confrontation every time they met him from 6x03 onwards (which is probably why he looks like he has a migraine the entire season :P) and so I don’t think there’s ANY WAY they could have plausibly sold any sort of real reconciliation or forgiveness in the start of the season if they’d wanted to, which they didn’t because they wanted Dean to be pissed at Cas all season for reasons which were just as frustrating and opaque to US, and I don’t know what they knew for sure about the end of the season but they were definitely planning all along for Cas to have a baaaad bad part in it because he was shifty and showing tells of lying and so on from the get go. I think if they’d made a twee moment for Dean to be given a chance to forgive Cas for not talking to him for a year, it would have basically just escalated Dean’s suspicion through the roof because Cas would never have been able to sell it when the bigger picture of why he did it was what all eventually poured out in TMWWBK. 

([here’s a link to my rewatch of 6x20 where I ramble a LOT more about the philosophy behind it all](https://elizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com/post/140908409263/6x20-rewatch-this-episode-ruined-memore))


	3. Eve and Where Monsters Come From

> **Anonymous**  asked:
> 
> Do do monsters come to being? I mean... we know how vampirism etc. Is transmitted, but how were they created? (We know about demons, but what about the others?) What is their offspring? Someone had to be the first. Was there a overall-being who was "god" for the monsters or was it a genetical defect? Or is it unknown? (There's probably a logical answer, but I'm just to tired to make it come to my mind)

* * *

I love Eve, Mother of All

here’s her superwiki page:

[http://www.supernaturalwiki.com/index.php?title=Eve](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.supernaturalwiki.com%2Findex.php%3Ftitle%3DEve&t=ZDFiOWYzYjhhZmIzMWQzYmNkMmMzOWJjNGQzMDYxNjdmOWI0YWY2ZSx4SHdzdjNGbA%3D%3D&b=t%3AEoTmUHpiEEiE91JGAXVv3Q&p=https%3A%2F%2Felizabethrobertajones.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F155584165278%2Fdo-do-monsters-come-to-being-i-mean-we-know&m=1)

I like the speculation mentioned on that page that she’s a sort of Leviathan because I also have thought that. Specifically that she’s related to them somehow, but is also much more than them, since she seems to “own” Purgatory and that was a place created as a prison for them, and since she has her own powers of creation of a very twisted type, I see her as a sort of demigod or angel of the Leviathans - possibly created by God to manage Purgatory with as much power as she needed to keep the Leviathans from fucking everything up. Whether she started to make monsters because she was bored or needed them or it just filled a nice little niche to add some flavour to the world - or, well, because SHE was trapped in there with the Leviathans and this was her influence over the “main” creation (and perverting it to her own style and having a sort of rival creation going on is a really neat thing, especially as it was successful and her alphas and other methods of spreading monsters have created an apparently nearly permanent influence on the planet…)

I really like the speech from the alpha vamp in 6x07, which includes this line:

> Alpha Vampire   
> When your kind first huddled around the fire, I was the thing in the dark! Now you think you can hurt me? 

it implies monsters have been around about as long as recognisable humans with their rudimentary stone age culture, fitting into the earliest sense of mythology humans could have had, and as monsters are sort of metaphorical of the anxieties and neuroses of human society, I like that they’ve been around from the start. 

Of course Eve also needs power to run Purgatory, and to contain the Leviathan (hey guess what happens after she dies and someone fucks up Purgatory completely by draining its power source completely :P) so it could be that whatever she initially had to manage them, wasn’t enough and the fight for the souls that heaven and hell are engaged in also began there - recognising the raw power of God’s favourite creation, she also finds a way to harvest it, and since Purgatory is a lockbox for the Leviathan that God put the seal on hoping they’d never ever get back into Creation, then the souls she takes from what’s basically a buffet for higher powers when they look at Humanity, are securely kept… Hell in contrast is like the low security prison people are walking in and out of all the time, and the purpose was never locking them away, but the torture, which incidentally  _involves_ trapping them there, but I guess only as long as it takes to make someone into a good demon for sneaking back out to raise hell on earth :P 

I also think she’s one of the most phenomenally wasted characters on the whole show because of her immense power and relevance to literally everything. There might not be other seasons with monster mytharcs, but there’s monsters in just about every season… (Uh… I haven’t checked for sure, but season 12 I think has only had one incidental vampire in a flashback in England, right? We haven’t had any monster episodes in the sense of children of Eve monsters?) … 

Anyway, thematically I would guess that Amara comes closest to re-treading this ground, but going way too far in the other direction of her beef with God 

Eve’s beef with God:

> EVE You do know that Jesus was just a man.
> 
> RICK Sure, but he was also the son of God, sent here because he loves us.
> 
> EVE God doesn’t care about you.
> 
> RICK Sure he does.
> 
> EVE Your father made you and then abandoned you, so you pray. You see signs where there’s nothing. But truth is, your apocalypse came and went, and you didn’t even notice. A mother would never abandon her children like he did. You’ll see.

Instead of being his sister and focusing on the soap opera family aspects, her feeling as a rival creator is there. You could say all the alphas are like her monster Jesus-es that she sent to spread her message (uh by biting and turning humans - this thought is probably a little blasphemous but then I’m not religious and this show is probably worse :P)

… And she expresses this to a random trucker but it’s a sentiment weirdly similar to Dean’s anger with God he expresses in 12x21. Amara also spoke a few times about Creation and re-making it, but she never did a whole lot except the zompires thing, very aimlessly. I’m not sure when she spoke about re-doing Creation she meant obliterating the universe in some of the earlier discussions about it, since as a “child” she was interested in the natural world, and in 11x09 also expressed a fondness for Creation, having picked a nice picnic spot to take Dean, and saying,

> Amara:   
> I had no other reason to harm his chosen. My issue is with my brother, not his creation. 

Meanwhile Eve is happily stealing humans for herself, intending to overrun the world with her creation, so she has a much more aggressive tactic, and if Dean hadn’t killed her when he did (and Crowley’s minions cleared up the loose ends) then her plan would have been one of the most destructive ones on the show, to rival what would have happened if they hadn’t stopped the Croatoan virus getting out in 5x21.

… Anyway as I was about to follow another thread on this I realised you only asked if she existed, not for a very long essay on All The Ways I Feel Supernatural Wasted Their Best Ever Character so um tl;dr the answer to your question is, yes, Eve is the Monster God who spread her monsters through the world via powerful and nigh-on un-killable “alpha” prototypes of all the usual* monsters.

 

*there are monsters in canon such as wendigo (*takes a shot*) that are not strictly “children of eve” although I wonder if the show would retcon them for a real return. It’s possible there’s a method of transmission that hunters have never analysed as the first season was working off vague folklore with no need to make a coherent set of worldbuilding rules underneath it. I’d also retcon the changelings from 3x02 into faires, and the striga in season 1 they classified as a witch, but I’d say is definitely a type of monster/fairy somewhere in the same family tree as the soul eater from 11x16 or banshee from 11x11 -  we just didn’t meet witches as we know them on the show until 3x09, which also retconned demons into humans, and changed them up from some sort of superpowered monster, and overall took the show in a very different direction with human threats and human nature vs the vast unknown of monsters and why they do such things. (… Also…. After 10x20 we also tracked a thread from grigori angels to djinn but djinn WERE Eve’s monsters and we know that from 6x01/6x10, which means either she perverted angels into them initially and through her monster infection powers it spread to humans, OR they just tap a very similar mechanic. The family trees are a mess :P)

Because hunters mostly wing it and just work out how to kill the thing and so on, it’s only really with the MoL that any magic-science has any sort of… accessible structure to it. They’ve done their research on monsters so it’s more of a chance to explain things than before… I’m sure if you asked Toni or Mick to explain where Wendigo come from they’d have a completely different answer to your average hunter working off legends of starving trapped loggers in the woods turning to cannibalism and becoming monstrous :P For one thing, there’s plenty of historical cannibalism recorded where people didn’t become wendigo (e.g. sieges or famines) and it seems to be based on location as well, so clearly there’s more at work there than hunters have ever really reckoned with, but… that’s also not really their job. :P

… I’m so sorry for this essay. I’m a writer and fantasy world building is one of my things that I really like doing. Throw Supernatural at me and I have a vein popping in my forehead making a coherent picture for it all because there’s so many HOLES and wasted potential and amazing ideas which are just lurking under the surface...


End file.
